Something curious happens when you’ve been in a romantic or significant relationship with another person for an extended period of time. It happens naturally and sometimes goes unnoticed until both parties involved take a step back to reflect on the time they’ve spent together.

You’re aware of speech dialects, which are, according to Google, “a particular form of a language that is peculiar to a specific region or social group.” You’ve most likely only heard this term in your geography or history classes. Perhaps you discussed it in a psychology or sociology class. But dialects are not only a topic for study. They are a complicated mix of specific vocabulary and nuances, of tone and body language, and of catchphrases used in the everyday language of a specific area or group of people.

Since, to be a group, you are only required to include yourself and one other person, I would argue that dialects extend not just to large populations of people like, for example, the people of the state of Michigan, but also to small people groups like those in workplaces, in clubs and organizations, and in the many cliques that plague our school systems. Each of these bodies of people has a distinct way of speaking about different topics and issues they find relevant to themselves. For example, someone in publishing may not know the vocabulary needed to complete a building project. That set of terms is completely limited to those who consider themselves builders, and thus, they may very well be the only ones who use that particular sect of language.

Recently my partner and I began reflecting on the soon-to-be two years of our relationship, and perhaps because we’re English majors, or perhaps because we’re very reminiscent of the quick two years behind us, we started recalling and comparing the language we use between the two of us, or our “couple dialect,” if you will. What we found was that at the beginning of our relationship, when we were just freshmen in college, we didn’t really have any particular speech patterns or ways of talking to each other that could be distinguished from our everyday speech. As the months and seasons went by, though, we noticed that the vocabulary we used when communicating, the body language, the plays on words and the dialect of our language became increasingly observable to people outside of our relationship.

Although I can’t recall the very first word we may have begun our dialect with, I can list off the numerous, and maybe the most obvious, words and particulars of our language. For nicknames, we began with “Babu” as a joke because a gamer we watched said it in reference to his significant other. I rejected it at first, but now we have two forms of the word: “Babu,” the original form, and “Bab,” the shortened form. We also shortened our names into nicknames for a while, where Dakota’s was “Dak” and mine was “Ty”. We’ve begun taking the articles and other arguably unnecessary words out of our conversations sometimes, using phrases like “What are do?” for “What are you doing?” and “But it cold out dare!” for “But it’s cold out there.”

We’ve also become likenesses of Shakespeare in that we’ve created so many words in our two years together. There’s “gooby,” which can be used as a noun or an adjective. There’s “crunchies,” which are fingers, and “crispies,” which are toes. There’s variations of names for the group Game Grumps on YouTube that Dakota and I watch every day, like “Grumpy Games.” You see where I’m going with this.

It’s probably clear to many people around us when Dakota and I are together that we’ve been together and/or have known each other for a long time. Not only because of the way we act do they tend to laugh, smile, or turn to look at us when we’re out, but because of the little language we’ve created between the two of us. Granted, we’ve known each other and have been the best of friends for nearly eight years, so that gives us a little bit of an advantage. Chances are, though, that as you’ve been reading about my experiences with a two-person dialect, you’ve been thinking of one (or a few) of your own with the people around you, be them with friends, family, significant others, or coworkers.

I think that our human ability to adapt and create personalized languages among ourselves with the people closest to us is beautiful. It’s like sharing an inside joke with a friend. There’s something there that only the two of you can understand and communicate about, and the unique dialects you share with the people around you should not be taken likely. They’re truly something special, a bond that may keep growing stronger with every day you spend together, and that’s truly magic.